What Matters Now in Asia

The following charts detail issues Erudite Risk reported on over the previous 7 days, from yesterday.

Every day of the week, in 12 countries across Asia, and from global sources, we collect:

• news media
• national government releases
• government releases at the City & State levels
• foreign embassy releases
• business association releases
• podcasts
• videos
• social media

Total data comes to 3-6 thousand articles, releases, and posts, per day. Sources are in English and local languages.

We analyze that data: categorize it, classify it, assign sentiment. We place tags on it related to industries and even job roles of who might be interested in seeing it.

We use 40+ risk categories and 30+ operations categories to categorize what the focus of the data is.

Then we deliver daily intelligence reports to subscribers of one of the six countries in Asia we currently cover.

Having all that data allows us to look at what the situation on the ground looks like, from a bird's eye point of view:

• What editorial decisions are being made?
• What is the policy focus now?
• What are people on the ground talking about?
• What are the 'centers of gravity' of the information sphere right now? What issues or ideas are all the data clustering around?

One of the things we can look at are what categories of issues is important right now. In other words, what matters now in each country?

Now, On To What Actually Matters Now in Asia

Below are some charts showing what matters now for the six countries we currently report on.

With some notes:

• Some data items/reports can fit into multiple categories. We've chosen to place them into one or another.
• If a category had no items covered, it was omitted. So, some countries have more buckets than others.
• Only relative values within a country matter, not numbers across countries as we have a different amount of available data from each country.

And some observations:

• Geopolitical risk is severe everywhere. It is the main overarching factor influencing policy and business decisions.
• Technological disruption is a major emerging concern.
• While disruption from AI is a concern, it has not yet spilled into actual concern over cybercrimes and data loss.
• Supply chain disruption is a major issue in most countries in Asia. This is understandable from both upstream and downstream points of view: with global supply chains in flux (driven largely by geopolitical risk) there is concern across Asia about supply disruption and also about being bypassed or cut out of future supply chains. The secondary concern is most acute in Taiwan, whose national security also relies on remaining a critical part of many other countries' supply chains. It is also an acute issue in China, where it is (of course) tightly coupled with geopolitical concerns.
• Climate change is a "middle of the scale" issue in each country. That may be either because it is difficult to address, or because the feedback loop is so slow that political points are difficult to earn by addressing it. Issues with faster feedback loops, like geopolitical risk, inflation, and economic growth, command more attention.

There are likely many other insights you can glean from the a above charts based on your experience in these countries in your industry and job role. I'll leave those up to you.

To learn more about Erudite Risk Intelligence, visit us at https://www.eruditerisk.com/service/risk-ops-intelligence

Thanks for reading,

Rodney J Johnson